ON BEING INCLUDED RACISM AND DIVERSITY IN INSTITUTIONAL LIFE

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Ahmed argues that a commitment to diversity is frequently substituted for a commitment to actual change. She traces the work that diversity does, examining how the term is used and the way it serves to make questions about racism seem impertinent. Her study is based in universities and her research is primarily in the UK and Australia, but the argument is equally valid in North America and beyond.
Category: Social Science

In Willful Subjects Sara Ahmed explores willfulness as a charge often made by some against others. One history of will is a history of attempts to eliminate willfulness from the will. Delving into philosophical and literary texts, Ahmed examines the relation between will and willfulness, ill will and good will, and the particular will and general will. Her reflections shed light on how will is embedded in a political and cultural landscape, how it is embodied, and how will and willfulness are socially mediated. Attentive to the wayward, the wandering, and the deviant, Ahmed considers how willfulness is taken up by those who have received its charge. Grounded in feminist, queer, and antiracist politics, her sui generis analysis of the willful subject, the figure who wills wrongly or wills too much, suggests that willfulness might be required to recover from the attempt at its elimination.
Category: Social Science

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.
Category: Social Science

In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus. In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines--departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies--were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power. Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.
Category: Education

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.
Category: Education

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism. A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.
Category: Social Science

Differences That Matter challenges existing ways of theorising the relationship between feminism and postmodernism which ask 'is or should feminism be modern or postmodern?' Sara Ahmed suggests that postmodernism has been allowed to dictate feminist debates and calls instead for feminist theorists to speak (back) to postmodernism, rather than simply speak on (their relationship to) it. Such a 'speaking back' involves a refusal to position postmodernism as a generalisable condition of the world and requires closer readings of what postmodernism is actually 'doing' in a variety of disciplinary contexts. Sara Ahmed hence examines constructions of postmodernism in relation to rights, ethics, subjectivity, authorship, meta-fiction and film.
Category: History

As the diversity of the students on campus increases, the importance for everyone in authority to understand students’ distinct cultures and how they perceive our institutions, and equally, to understand our own privilege, and often unconscious cultural assumptions, has never been greater. This book presents a comprehensive set of resources to guide students of education, faculty, higher education administrators, and student affairs leaders in creating an inclusive environment for under-represented groups on campus. It is intended as a guide to gaining a deeper understanding of the various multicultural groups on college campuses for faculty in the classroom and professional staff who desire to understand the complexity of the students they serve, as well as reflect on their own values and motivations. The contributors introduce the reader to the relevant theory, models, practices, and assessment methods to prepare for, and implement, a genuinely multicultural environment. Recognizing that cultural identity is more than a matter of ethnicity and race, they equally address factors such as gender, age, religion, and sexual orientation. In the process, they ask the reader to assess his or her own levels of multicultural sensitivity, awareness, and competence. The book approaches multiculturalism from three perspectives, each of which comprises a separate section: awareness; cultural populations; and cultural competence practice. Section One defines multiculturalism and multicultural competence, considers changing student demographics, explores the impact environment has on culture, and provides the readers with criteria for assessing their cultural competence and awareness of their own racial identity. Section Two addresses the cultural characteristics of specific ethnic or cultural populations, emphasizing their commonalities, and describing programs and practices that have successfully promoted their development. Each chapter includes discussion questions, and/or suggested activities that practitioners can undertake on their own campuses. Individual chapters respectively cover the culture and experiences of African Americans, Asian and Pacific Island Americans, Latinas/os, Native Americans, biracial and multiracial students, the disabled, international students, non-traditional students, students of faith, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, and analyze White Americans’ attitudes to issues of privilege, racial identity, and social justice. The inclusion of a chapter on the cultural characteristics of White students provides an opportunity for members of the majority culture to perceive of themselves in a cultural sense, and to appreciate their own culture as a first step in allowing them to recognize and appreciate other cultures. The concluding section offers suggestions on how to use the book’s insights to achieve systemic change in the college environment. The book is intended as a text for students, and as a practical guide for faculty, academic administrators, student affairs professionals, and others who want to foster an environment in which all students can succeed. It includes case studies, discussion questions, examples of best practice, and recommends resources to use in the classroom.
Category: Education

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.
Category: Social Science